Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and presented by International Development Research Centre and co-hosted by UBC and the Canada-India Foundation, there has been much talk of a coming Asian century, to be dominated by the economic strength and political assertion of China and India. This talk will critically scrutinize the claims made on behalf of India, and in particular the belief, held by some Westerners and perhaps by many Indians, that India is a coming superpower. It will acknowledge the durability, against the odds, of India’s national unity and of its democracy. It will appreciate the recent surge in economic growth. At the same time, it will provide a critical analysis of the deep fault-lines within Indian society, politics, economics, and culture, to conclude that the talk of India’s imminent rise to superstardom is highly premature. Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Now a full-time writer, he has previously taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Randall Jimerson – Archivists and the Call of Justice
As part of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, Randall Jimerson presents on the history of recordkeeping and archives, and reveals that they have often been used to consolidate and enforce political power, often to control or oppress people. Far from being neutral repositories for facts and evidence, archives have always been sites of political, economic, social, and intellectual power. As archivists recognize that neutrality is an illusion they can take positive steps to ensure that the archival record carries the stories of previously marginalized societal groups and supports liberation, accountability, and social justice.
Webcast Sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Farina Mir – The Punjabi Literary Formation: Language and Affect in a Vernacular Culture
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and lecture hosted by the Department of Asian Studies at UBC as part of the 2nd Annual Celebration of Punjabi in honour of the memory of Harjit K. Sidhu, Professor Farina Mir explores the contours of a colonial-era Punjabi literary formation in India. That is, those individuals who shared in the practices of producing, circulating, performing, and consuming Punjabi literary texts. She will argue that the Punjabi literary formations pragmatic engagements with colonial institutions were far less important than the affective attachments its adherents established with a place, with an old but dynamic corpus of stories, and with the moral sensibility that suffused those stories.
Biography of Speaker
Dr. Farina Mir is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She holds a B.A. (magna cum laude, 1993) from Barnard College in English literature and Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures. She received her Ph.D. in History, with distinction, from Columbia University in 2002. Trained as a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her research has focused on the social, cultural, and religious history of late-colonial north India.
Selected Articles Available at UBC Library
Mir, F. (2006). Imperial policy, provincial practices: Colonial language policy in nineteenth-century india. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 43(4), 395-427. [Link]
Mir, F. (2006). Genre and devotion in punjabi popular narratives: Rethinking cultural and religious syncretism.Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48(3), 727-758. [Link]
Mir, F. (2005). Ann grodzins gold and bhoju ram gujar. in the time of trees and sorrows: Nature, power and memory in rajasthan. durham: Duke university press, 2002. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47(4), 892-896. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Jack Zipes' Utopian Tendencies of Oddly Modern Fairy Tales IKBLC webcast
Jack Zipes is one of the worlds leading authorities on fairy tales, writing about and translating them. An internationally renowned scholar and author of more than 50 books on many subjects, he has through his writings transformed research on fairy tales, particularly with respect to how they function in the socialization of readers. Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
Sponsored by Green College and the supporting units for the M.A. in Childrens Literature Program (MACL): the School of Library Archival and Information Studies, the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program in the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
UBC site of major library conference in 2012
UBC has been selected as the host campus for the 2012 meeting of the ALADN Conference.
ALADN, which stands for the Academic Library Advancement and Development Network, is a group that focuses on fundraising and development issues for academic and research libraries in North America. Members include professionals involved in development and advancement.
UBC was chosen as the 2012 site for the ALADN conference following a presentation by Shakeela Begum, UBC Library’s Director of Development, at the recent ALADN gathering in Santa Monica, California. This is a great win for the Library and for UBC, as more than 200 guests are expected to attend the event.
The 2011 conference, entitled Take a Trip through Academic Fundraising, will be held at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Congratulations to UBC Library and the University of British Columbia!
Sandra Singh – The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
Presented by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) Colloquium Series, The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which is part of the UBC Library system, has an intriguing and ambitious mission relating to its physical geography and that of the province of BC. As part of a vast campus community, the Learning Centre is charged with a mandate to support academic excellence by providing diverse learning and teaching supports as well as inspiring people spaces. Dedicated to the prosperity of the province and to integrating community into our work here on campus, we also look outward, searching for opportunities to connect and support connections between UBC and communities across BC. How does all this fit within the traditional role of the academic library? Does it or is the Learning Centre an entirely different entity with simply an administrative connection to the UBC Library? Join Learning Centre Director Sandra Singh as she discusses the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, its mission and activities, and its place on both the University campus generally and within the context of the UBC Library. Sandra Singh is Director of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
BC History Digitization Program: 2010 Recipients Announced
A handful of First Nations projects and the first out-of-province initiative are among the successful recipients of the 2010/11 B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP) awards.
The digitization program, an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, was launched in 2006. It provides matching funds that help libraries, archives, museums and other organizations digitize unique historical items, including images, print and sound materials.
In 2010/11, the Learning Centre provided nearly $200,000 for 25 projects. Altogether, BDHDP funding has totalled more than $650,000 for 76 projects throughout British Columbia.
Grant funding requests for 2010/11 significantly exceeded available resources and this meant that the adjudication committee had to make some difficult decisions. This year marked the first out-of-province grant, made to the United Church of Canada, which is headquartered in Toronto. It is one of three approved projects involving records relating to First Nations groups in British Columbia. The project will result in the digitization of visual and documentary records relating to Methodist and United Church missions in B.C.
In addition, grant funding has been awarded to eleven photographic digitization projects around the province as well as five applications that featured the digitization of local newspapers.
During the past four years, projects have included photographic collections, community newspapers, oral history recordings, city directories, medical artifacts, three-dimensional fossil specimens and more.
For a complete list of grant recipients and project descriptions, please visit here.
Front cover exposure for RBSC, UBC Library Vault
The April 2010 issue of College & Research Libraries News, an American publication, features an image from UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections on the front cover. Some additional information about the image and the UBC Library Vault is provided inside the publication.
You can view the issue here.
IKBLC Webcast of Don Page's Black Hole Information Loss: Hawking's Greatest Mistake?
Hawking’s 1974 calculation of thermal emission from a classical black hole led to his 1976 proposal that information may be lost from our universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole, which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation. Objections to this idea appeared as early as 1980, but it took two decades for the balance of opinion, including Hawking’s, to shift to the belief that information is not ultimately lost by black holes. The debate led to a lot of understanding of gravitational physics, so even if Hawking was originally wrong, it was a truly great mistake. (March 17, 2010). Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Don Page is a Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Growing up in Alaskan villages, he completed his high school education by correspondence through the University of Nebraska Extension Division. He received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, summa cum laude, from William Jewell College in Missouri, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis, “Accretion into and Emission from Black Holes”, was supervised by Kip S. Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Page then moved to the University of Cambridge, England, where he held a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, worked as a research assistant under Prof. Hawking, and received an M.A.
Ramachandra Guha – Ten Reasons why India will not and must not become a Superpower
Presented by International Development Research Centre and co-hosted by UBC and the Canada-India Foundation, there has been much talk of a coming Asian century, to be dominated by the economic strength and political assertion of China and India. This critically scrutinizes the claims made on behalf of India, and in particular the belief, held by some Westerners and perhaps by many Indians, that India is a coming superpower. It acknowledges the durability, against the odds, of India’s national unity and of its democracy.
It appreciates the recent surge in economic growths, but, at the same time, it provides a critical analysis of the deep fault-lines within Indian society, politics, economics, and culture, to conclude that the tale of India’s imminent rise to superstardom is highly premature. Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Now a full-time writer, he has previously taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
UBC Library Resources
Guha, R. (Ed.). (2014). Makers of Modern Asia. Harvard University Press. [Link]
Guha, R. (2013). Gandhi Before India. Penguin UK. [Link]
Guha, R. (2003). A corner of a foreign field: the Indian history of a British sport. Pan Macmillan. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides